NASA's Budget Could Get Infusion from Other U.S. Departments

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WASHINGTON — Congressional appropriators could tap the funding
accounts of the U.S. departments of Commerce and Justice to help
cover what some see as a $1 billion shortfall in NASA’s $18.7
billion spending plan for 2012, which allocates less money for a
heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule than Congress directed last
year.

“There’s over a billion-dollar difference between the budget
request and the authorized levels in [20]12 for the
launch system and the crew vehicle, and now that falls
squarely back on the shoulders of [the appropriations committees]
to try and figure out where to come up with that money,” said a
panelist at a March 23 breakfast on Capitol Hill. Sponsored by
Women in Aerospace (WIA), the breakfast was held under the
Chatham House Rule, an 84-year-old protocol fashioned by the
London-based nonprofit think-tank to promote frank discussion
through anonymity. [ What
Obama and Congress Should Do for Spaceflight ]

The panelist, one of six whose names and job titles were
circulated by WIA prior to the meeting, said funding requested in
NASA’s 2012
spending plan does not square with levels Congress set in
the NASA
Authorization Act of 2010 that U.S. President Barack Obama
signed into law in October. Specifically, the request called
for spending $1.2 billion less than the $4 billion Congress
authorized for the heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew capsule
in 2012. At the same time, the request includes $350 million
more than the $500 million Congress authorized to nurture
development of commercial vehicles to deliver cargo and crews
to the International Space Station after the space shuttle
retires later this year.

Consequently, the panelist said, it is now up to
congressional appropriators “to find a billion dollars in
other places in NASA to pay for those activities or to decide to
make those tradeoffs and take that money out of the departments
of Commerce or Justice or the other agencies that are funded in
the same bill as NASA.”

NASA’s annual appropriation is part of a broader spending package
totaling nearly $65 billion that funds the U.S. Commerce and
Justice departments, the National Science Foundation, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology and related
agencies.

But with NASA and other federal agencies operating in a fiscally
constrained environment, the panelist said Congress could
struggle to fund new multibillion-dollar programs next year.

“It’s not impossible but the ability to do that is severely
constrained in the environment we’re working in now, and that’s
exacerbated by budget requests coming up from the administration
that don’t track with the authorization,” the panelist said.

Congress has yet to pass an appropriations bill for 2011, leaving
NASA and most federal agencies to subsist at 2010 spending levels
in the current budget year. The panelist said passing spending
legislation for NASA “is a complicated and challenging thing this
year, and it will be again next year” given a fiscal climate that
has changed dramatically authorized funding levels for the space
agency were set last fall.

However, the panelist said the appropriations subcommittees that
fund NASA are “very supportive of the agency, they’re supportive
of the authorization, they want to see NASA get as close as
possible to those authorized levels, so that will be a work in
progress.”

This article was provided bySpace News,
dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.